My Digital Art Secrets I am often asked how I do my artwork.  In an attempt to answer this question and help others who might learn to love digital art as I have, I have written down some of my methods here for those who might be interested.

Finding Inspiration Finding inspiration for artwork has never been a problem for me.  Early on... I discovered a great tool to help me.  This tool is a "random seed generator". 

It is a software tool that churns out random textures and graphics based upon certain settings that you can control.  You never know what the result will be and that is exciting.  Once you look at what the generator has created, many times you will "see" something hidden in the image.  It's very much like watching the clouds go by and noticing that the cloud looks like an eagle or like the profile of a man and so on. The most promising and exciting texture images are the ones I save to use later as starting points for my art.  I also incorporate my own digital photography into many of my compositions.  But the original ideas nearly always come from the random generated art.

I have acquired a rather large collection of this "starter" art over the last few years.  In fact, I have much more than I can ever use, so I plan to offer some of it here on the site for free.

Filters and Plugins Where would I be without my filters and plugins.  Well, to be honest, I would not be quite so interested in the digital media. The filters and plugins available for Photoshop and other graphic software make the digital media attractive, versatile and so exciting.  I absolutely love to "play" with the colors in my images.  My favorite filters are "Harry's Filters" which I use on many of my images to acheive a beautiful flowing blend of colors.  The" Artistic -> Atmospherizer" filter applies an instant random blending of colors to an image and can be very lovely.  I probably use this filter more than any other.  I also love the artistic filters in Photoshop such as the "palette knife", the blur tools and the light rendering filter.  Creating digital art, for me, is an adventure and a mystery because so much of it is unplanned.  I never know what I will be creating until it "appears" in front of me.  Perhaps the hardest part is learning to wait for the right image to appear... one that will appeal to my heart and engage my mind and my natural attraction to learning new skills.